Siddhartha Mukherjee is a pioneering physician, oncologist, and author who has redefined our public discourse on human health, medicine and science. A profoundly influential voice in the scientific community, he is best known for his books, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which earned him the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene: An Intimate History which won international awards and was recognized by The Washington Post and The New York Times as one of the most influential books of 2016. His published works exhibit an outstanding literary skill that has left an indelible mark on our culture, as The Emperor of All Maladies has been adapted into a documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns, and was included among Time magazine’s 100 best nonfiction books of the past century.

Serving as a professor of medicine at Columbia University and as a staff cancer physician at the university’s medical center, Dr. Mukherjee generates hope for countless patients and families around the world, while revolutionizing our blueprint for healing.

Matthew Cobb is a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester. He has published extensively on the history of genetics, including his 2015 book Life’s Greatest Secret, and was one of the on-screen experts in The Gene. His latest books are The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience, and Smell: A Very Short Introduction.

Richard Sever, Ph.D. is Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and Co-Founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv. He has edited numerous books in molecular biology and worked as an editor on several journals.

Social Distancing and Flattening the Curve

This article from Medium.com does an excellent job of laying out the known history of Covid19 and its progression, as well as lays out clearly why it is imperative to take precautionary measures to slow the spread of the virus as soon as possible.

On March 10th, UCSF held a panel discussion with public health and microbiology experts to discuss the current (at the time) state of knowledge of Covid19 in the US, including sobering and frank discussions of likely numbers for infection, fatality, and recurrence. The linked website has a bullet-point style summary of the panel discussion.

The Be A Better Scientist Blog shared a video chat of three scientists discussing R0, the case fatality rate, and what "Flatten the Curve" means and why it is so important.

This Joint Update from multiple physicians, posted by Dr. Nancy Yen Shipley, laying out clear information about Covid19 and plain-language explanations of why to take it seriously and how to help slow its spread

Health Information

Finally, above all else, it is important to keep a clear head. Hand sanitizers that contain >60% alcohol are effective at disrupting the viral envelope, but nothing is better than vigorous hand washing. The video below starkly demonstrates with easy visuals how important it is to be thorough when you wash your hands in order to be effective.

The best way to combat the dangers that coronavirus pose is to help keep the medical infrastructure from being overloaded rapidly. By slowing the spread of the virus, although hospitals may eventually treat the same total number of cases, they will not have to attempt to do so all at once. Overtaxing the capacity of hospitals and clinics results in fatalities due to insufficient medical resources for symptoms that could be more easily treated in less overburdened times. So remember to avoid exposure when possible, and, because someone could be a symptom-free carrier for almost a week before falling ill, wash your hands frequently to kill any virus you may have been exposed to

Stay healthy. And if you are self quarantined, we recommend John M. Barry's excellent book on the 1918 Spanish Flu, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.

The CSHL Library has seats available for online training through the O'Reilly Online Learning. This is a great resouce to learn a new skill, the latest programming languages or to get a certification. The training seat will give you access to: Interactive learning (with prebuilt coding environments), Live Online training, learning paths and lots of O'Reilly technical books. Contact Tom x6898 in the library, if you would like access to a training seat.

The PubMed interface we all know and love, and have been used to for decades, is getting a makeover.

To bring the face of the world's most popular biomedical literature database into the 21st century, NCBI (The National Center for Biotechnology Information), a division of NLM (the National Library of Medicine), is unveiling a new mobile-friendly main page, with a fundamentally different underlying database-searching algorithm. That new algorithm, named Best Match, uses machine learning to tailor search results for each user based on past search histories.

This updated version of PubMed is currently available at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ . The new PubMed will become the default in spring 2020 and will ultimately replace the legacy version. You can learn more about it in the NLM Technical Bulletin linked here.

The Best Match algorithm was introduced in a PLoS Biology paper in August of 2018. It can be found in the PubMed Central database at this link.

If you have any questions about the new PubMed, don't hesitate to contact Matt Dunn in the library at x8825 or dunn@cshl.edu Or, you can always contact the general library staff at x6872 or libraryhelp@cshl.edu

Compatibility with enterprise imaging tools allows Nomad to be installed and pre-configured for your institution in all computers across your organization

For further technical details about LibKey Nomad please visit the LibKey Nomad FAQ in our support pages

How does Nomad function with PubMed?

With Nomad installed, for the first time clinicians and researchers are able to download articles directly from the search results screen in PubMed! LibKey presents in-line links as well as the ability to view articles "in context" within BrowZine, helping to launch them into a serendipitous discovery journey to similar articles from the same journal. Further, LibKey also brings in the massive 22,000+ journal cover image archive to enhance the pubmed result page allowing popular journals like NEJM, BMJ, JAMA and others to jump out in the search results to help researchers better filter their search results.

How do you install Nomad?

LibKey Nomad is a Chrome browser extension which means you install it via the Chrome store. Installing and setup is quick and easy. Simply download and install the extension, choose your supported institution "Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory" and you are all set.

CSHL's resident historian, Jan Witkowski, regularly conducts interviews with the scientists who come to present at meetings here on campus. The Symposia week is a particularly busy time for him, but his hard work and effort pay off handsomely. For instance, in 2016, Jan had the pleasure to interview Bill Kaelin about his work on oxygen-sensing in cancer. As of today, October 7, 2019, it has been announced that Bill shares the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work!

You can watch the interview here, and learn all about Bill's impoortant research, as well as Jan's tireless efforts to bring an understanding of high-caliber work like Bill's to the broader public.

CSHL Library & Archives together with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory are proud to announce a fantastic $5 million dollar gift from Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) which will help us to support and maintain the current archives of Nobel Prize Laureates and future Nobel Prize Laureates Collections, as well as create new educational programs.